The practitioner uses an understanding of individual and group motivation and behavior to create a learning environment that encourages positive social interaction, active engagement in learning, and self-motivation.
I would describe my FoS class as positive, energetic, curious, social, and talkative. I would say that having a positive, energetic and curious class enhances the learning. However the social aspect makes the class very talkative and the class can get off topic often. I have learned that assigning partner-based projects have a negative affect because the work takes longer to complete. The students find themselves off task and talking to each other about non-related topics. After learning about this we made projects individual and if we needed to do group work we would allow no more than two students to be paired together. This required a lot of teacher circulation to answer questions and keep students focused and on task. During lessons all of these adjectives enhanced the lesson. I had some students answer a question and I would refer to them throughout the lesson. If students answered a question I was sure to give them credit for their answer and to keep referring to them throughout the lesson. When we were discussing the lava types of volcanoes we talked about the pyroclastic ash and I asked the students, “imagine if you were out running the ash, where would you go?” Travis answered, “I would get caught in the ash but I’d pose like this...” which added humor and the class laughed. The class also had curiosity: I had a student confused about how hot magma was and I ended up asking if he was a star wars fan. He said yes and I asked if he watched revenge of the sith. He said yes, and I asked if he remembered the lava battle. He said no and the interest of the class was peaked so I said if we had time after notes I would show them a short clip. Then Dawson asked if they could deactivate volcanoes and we talked about star trek. He said he never saw it and I explained that it takes place in the future and they find a way to do that. If we have time I’ll show you a clip. We ended up not having enough time so I didn’t get to show the clips to them but I thought it would be cool for students to see the visual effects that movies can provide to compliment science. The only negative side to having students ask too many questions during class is that we weren't able to complete the notes. Which we would have to continue tomorrow and I wasn't able to show them the clips to answer their curious questions.
In the following days we started to review for their volcano assessment. The students were instructed to complete a volcano practice assessment and Travis came to class early after lunch and asked for help on understanding subduction zones. I was flattered that he came to class early to know this topic better. He said he was ready for his quiz and that he wanted to do really well. I had a few students say that they didn’t recieve a practice assessment so I thought that we should at least cover the three types of volcanoes as a class and I figured it would be quick. However when I asked about the lava type (high or low viscosity) the students had two different definitions of viscosity. I knew Travis would have the answer so I asked him to give an example of high viscosity and he said honey and explained why the composite and cinder cone volcano would have high viscosity. Then Reese explained why a shield volcano would have low viscosity. I tried helping the students remember the three types of volcanoes by using mnemonic devices such as: shield- shore, strato- st. helens, cinder cone- cinderella’s dress. Both of these students are normally the social butterflies of the classroom so when they are participating in the lesson the rest of the class is focused and intrigued to hear what Reese and Travis have to say. This week's rewarding achievement was learning how to channel their energy towards the lesson.
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